arxivcs.AIcs.CLcs.LO2026-07-11
Interventional Grounding Audits: Black-Box Premise-Dependency Tests for LLM Chain-of-Thought via Predicate Substitution
Large language models produce chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that appears logically sound yet may not genuinely depend on its stated premises. We introduce interventional grounding audits, a black-box, step-level test of premise dependency: we intervene on a single premise by s…